My workgroup name ( which btw is one of 4 on my network ) is not in capitals and I don't have the netbios name specified in smb.conf but if it works for you then who am I to argue.

EDIT: Forget the following recommendation. I remembered I still have a machine here with Mint10 on it and it appears there is essentially this fix already in place labeled "samba" which forces nmbd to start after the network is up.

As for nmbd needing to be restarted after a reboot you might try this:

I don't have any letters capitalized in workgroup anywhere on my network. In fact the default smb.conf that comes from the Samba Factory does not have workgroup in caps. Your post was the first time I ever head if it - but I don't get out much

Please add a [SOLVED] at the end of your original subject header if your question has been answered and solved.

Just thought I'd chime in. We have a laptop running vista enterprise that refused to see any linux machines running samba (ver 3-5-8). After changing the browser election section so that linux is never a master browser, I could see both linux machines in vista's network neighborhood. Here is a snippet from my smb.conf. I also set a netbios name on the linux boxes, but since windows laptop is vista, I don't think netbios is in use (not sure about that, the vista machine is not mine)

Through some experimenting, I learned that netbios is still very relevant to networking windows vista/7 puters. When you disable netbios over tcp/ip, on a windows pc, you can't see other windows puters on the network. As for your unique example, I never had to fiddle with those entries on my smb.conf. Having said that, I've never fiddled with a version of Vista/7 higher than home premium. I bypass authentication to a linux share by using this argument in smb.conf:

Probably defeatist if you're demanding more secure solutions, but it's a fast, and easy, short term measure. My problem has always been authenticating into a Vista/7 share from a linux pc. Especially if the windows pc has no login password. That gets messy.

You know, share level security has been deprecated. It's been deprecated for about 5 years now however so I don't know when it will be but sooner or later it will be officially removed as an option. The developer in charge of this thing is getting more demonstrative is his objections to having it used:

Jeremy AllisonMon, 29 Mar 2010 12:54:26 -0700

Well you can replace security = share with the correct "map to guest"options, so it really isn't useful in the way you think. Having saidthat we haven't (yet) removed it, and I just refactored the codethat implements it, so it'll probably be around causing us troublefor a while yet .

There's nothing that it does that can't be donewith normal user-level security.

In any event if everything else is working as designed the default settings in smb.conf ( for the non debian based Mint ) should handle this:"security = user" + "map to guest = Bad User" = "security = share"

In Debian based mint there is no override for "map to guest" in smb.conf so the system defaults to "map to guest = Never" which just about eliminates any guest access for anonymous Windows clients. Windows made a design decision for reasons unknown that insists on transmitting the client users actual local login user name and password when it browses for shares. If that user has a corresponding samba username and password on the Linux server then he is authenticated even before attempting to access any specific share but if he does not then he is mapped to the guest account in normal Mint ( because he is a "Bad User" ) but rejected outright in Debian based Mint ( because of "Never" ) unless you add back the "Bad User" reference.

Now that I've ranted on though I too have no experience with Vista Enterprise but I'm beginning to think that there something different about it. If you look at his other post ( viewtopic.php?f=157&t=93542 ) there's no problem is accessing his shares with WinXP - it's only Vista Enterprise. Maybe setting "security = share" will work ......

Please add a [SOLVED] at the end of your original subject header if your question has been answered and solved.

Both a samba client and a Windows machine should see the samba server with this new name.

This comment is simply not true:

It's not enough to change the netbios string in smb.conf. You have to change your hostname.

In a typical home network there is no lan side dns and the only way to communicate is with the "netbios name" which Windows will recognize and can still use.

Okay, I'm back after updating to Mint 14 Cinnamon. I again have the issue where a Vista box can see the Mint box but calls it "unknown device". Mint sees the Vista box and browses shared folders/files without a problem. Shared printer connected to the Vista box prints from Mint just fine. But the Vista box can't access anything on the Mint box (which happens to include my music/video library). I edited the smb.conf by adding a netbios name line in the global section that specifies a name <15 characters and restarted smbd. I also added a line in global section of force user = my username. I have also run